Texas A&M Awards First AI Bridge Seed Grants, Fueling Interdisciplinary Innovation
Five collaborative projects will advance AI-enabled research in fields ranging from ecology to energy and public health.
Texas A&M University awarded its first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bridge Seed Grants, the Division of Research announced today, marking the next milestone in a university-wide effort to accelerate interdisciplinary, AI-enabled research.
The initiative provided one-year, $20,000 seed grants to five research teams, giving them the opportunity to prototype new approaches, refine collaborative ideas and generate the preliminary results needed to pursue larger research investments.
“The AI Bridge initiative is an important investment in interdisciplinary research, where artificial intelligence amplifies human ingenuity,” said Dr. Angela K. Wilson, vice president for research at Texas A&M. “These seed grants are an investment in collaboration that brings together exceptional researchers to solve some of society’s most pressing challenges. By connecting expertise across the university, we are building the partnerships, ideas and momentum that will define the future of AI-enabled discovery and further advance Texas A&M as a global leader in research, innovation and impact.”
The 2026 AI Bridge Seed Grant investments are expected to position teams for larger external funding opportunities. Funded projects reflect the wide range of interdisciplinary collaborations supported through the AI Bridge initiative:
- Cheng Zhang, Engineering, and Toryn Schafer, Arts and Sciences, “Bridging the Gap in Wildlife Monitoring: A Hybrid AI-Ecological Approach for Cryptic Taxa Detection and Multi-Source Data Fusion.”
- Ruihong Huang, Engineering, Zhiyao Yang, Engineering,and Zheng O’Neill, Engineering, “Building Energy Time Series Foundation Model via Physics-Constrained Discrete Tokenization.”
- Jian Tao, Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, Anish Jantrania, AgriLife Research, June Wolfe, Engineering Extension Service, and Rajiv Srivastava, AgriLife Research, “AI-Driven Digital Twin for Safe and Scalable Wastewater Reuse Systems.”
- Xianyang Zhang, Arts and Sciences, James Cai, Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and Robert Chapkin, Agriculture and Life Sciences, “GEOcellar: An AI Agent System for Hypothesis Generation and Iterative Analysis of Single-Cell RNA-seq Data.”
- Tianbao Yang, Engineering, and Xiaowei Chen, Arts and Sciences, “Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning with Geometry-Constrained Fine-Tuning for DAS-Based Phase Picking.”
The program received 56 proposals representing 122 investigators from across the university, demonstrating both the depth of AI expertise at Texas A&M and the growing interest in interdisciplinary partnerships. Proposals were evaluated by a review panel composed of faculty experts from a broad range of disciplines.
“The response to the inaugural AI Bridge Seed Grant competition demonstrated just how much enthusiasm exists for interdisciplinary AI research across Texas A&M,” said Dr. Henry Fadamiro, associate vice president for research, strategic initiatives. “Those relationships are essential for tackling today’s most complex research questions, and the seed grants provide the support needed to turn promising ideas into lasting collaborations.”
The inaugural AI Bridge Summit and Seed Grant program is supported by the Texas A&M Division of Research, the Texas A&M Institute of Data Science, the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, the College of Arts and Sciences and Texas A&M AgriLife Research.
